Well this term we have really started to conserve objects, which has been great, we’ve had some great tuition from a very skilled paper conservator, who has been guiding us through the different techniques. Friday we were working on wet paper repairs, which uses japanese tissues and wheat starch paste to repair tears and form infills where paper is missing.
This is an old piece of laid paper, from a book. Initially it had two tears and two missing sections (not including the hole in the middle which I haven’t fixed yet!), all of which I have now repaired.
The japanese tissue used for the repair was called Tangujo, and the paper used for the infills was an ‘orphan’ piece of handmade antique laid paper. Unfortunately when doing the corner repair I failed to correctly line up the laid lines, and mine’s gone a bit skew-whiff, which is a bit pants and what seems like a lost opportunity to get it right. Mph. The infill paper was extremely crinkled, which meant a great opportunity to practice humidification, which worked pretty well even if I do say so myself!
